On Fri, 2009-06-19 at 22:06 -0500, asmith wrote: > Thanks for the replies. > > I guess it is a good idea for me to try the Linux OS on a pc and just > look what it is and try everything locally first. > > Is it possible I install the Linux on my pc which has windows as well? > (running both at the same time) > Yes. Many distros offer a 'live CD'. You can boot from this without installing Linux and without altering your hard disk in any way. It will run quite slowly, both because CDs are much slower than hard disks and because everything is compressed on the disk, but it will give you a feel for the OS. If you have 15 GB free on your hard disk you can set up a dual boot system (this fairly complete development Fedora 10 system uses 10 GB of a 160 GB disk) but you can't run Windows and Linux at the same time unless you use Linux as the main OS and run Windows under it in a virtual PC. OTOH, if you have an older PC that's now too slow to run current Windows it may run rather well under Linux. My house server is an old Pentium 3 box (IBM NetVista with an 866 MHz P3, 512 MB RAM and a 40 GB hard disk). that happily ran the Linux desktop in 256 MB RAM. I run a large background load as well as the Gnome graphical desktop on this machine: the extra RAM just makes it a bit faster. HTH Martin
